I recently started playing this game together with my wife, and so far it has been really fun. But there are a few things that could be changed for the better especially when it comes to single player and coop. These suggestions are mostly tied to exploration and progression:
- Treasure maps: Exploration can be quite rewarding in games, but if you find what you are looking for all the time, it stops being exciting. There are just too many bottles at the beaches, and you get tired of finding them 5 minutes after you start playing the game. It quickly becomes a farming issue instead of exploration. The second issue is that the event is always army of the damned. Adding some more events could be beneficial. Like underwater treasure guarded by an alpha shark or something. All in all, give us far less bottles (and maybe increase the loot from each one), and vary them up a bit. Hunting treasure is fun after all, or should be at least.
- The sea should be more dynamic: Sailing in this game is really fun tbh. But the encounters could need some diversity. Currently in coop and single player, you only see ships of the damned (who only spawn in armadas btw), and storms always spawn on top of you. Every zone contains a lot of ships of the damned, so you are sure to encounter them all the time, and since water spouts always spawn on you, you are sure encounter them a lot too. This ties to what I said in the treasure map section: If something happens all the time, it stops being exciting. In this case it becomes more of a nuisance. So I suggest you add more variety here too. Add some trade ships with lots of good trade resources sailing around. If a player attacks them, his ship gets a debuff that will aggro Navy ships sailing around. Also add some pirates that will aggro players and navy ships alike (I know you are adding pirates with the pirate encampment patch, which is great!). When it comes to storms let them be more random so you can see them in the distance, or at least see the spouts in the distance and make them more dangerous. This will add drama and tension. Adding more types of storms like lightning storms and maybe a rare Tsunami could also spice things up a bit.
I don't think these suggestions would cost too many hours in programming time, and they wouldn't really require too many new assets.

Atlas
One server admin’s perspective on how to save Atlas.
About me, I run a small hosting server for game servers. I mostly serve a small gaming community and a few streamers. Most of my experience on game server hosting started in 2015. However, I have over 25 years of sysadmin experience.
Atlas is an ambitious idea. I say idea because at this point that is all it is. As it stands now the game continues to bleed players. Even with new content players are just not returning to the game. It is my opinion that this is primarily due to the complete lack of support for unofficial servers.
One can’t discuss Atlas without mentioning ARK. Just in case you didn’t know, Atlas, Grapeshot, is made up of ARK Developers and Producers. The game itself has a lot of code ported from ARK as well. This should have made several aspects of the game just work. Many of the features of ARK that work very well have been broken in Atlas. Below are the things that I feel are done right and things that need changes.
Done right:
· Water system and weather. The water mechanics, waves, wind etc, all are wonderful. I can’t say enough good things about this part of the game. I truly enjoy and most players I know enjoy sailing. It is fun and you can really immerse in this part of the game.
· Changed stats. The way stats have been changed generally are good. Much of the power creep that has occurred in ARK is negated with several stats not being changeable and others having much smaller changes. This is for both players, animals.
· Building system. Hands down the building system is a 500% improvement. Every aspect to how building works in Atlas is by far one of the best of any of these types of games. I especially like the multi-part system where a wall can be many different things just by cycling when u place.
Needs Work:
· Animals. While some aspects to animals are ok, several other parts are not. Either you have a taming system, or you don’t. At this point you have, in my opinion, a dumb system. Same with breeding either make it work or don’t have it. It was stated that animals were not going to be a focus of this game. If that was the case, then why make all the changes that make it feel stupid. If animals are not the focus, then don’t give them a lot of utility. If they are needed then don’t change what has worked before, ARK, to some stupid system that doesn’t work well. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it. At this point you have gone too far to obviously revert to ARK systems, so you need spend some time and make it work.
Major changes Needed:
These next parts are more about how the current server systems work.
Ini files.
· Don’t make us guess what works or doesn’t work here. Have someone spend some time and Actually document the current ini file options for servers.
· Fix difficulty scaling, whatever you did to totally bork this, undue it. Add or go back to how ARK difficulty scaling works. Right now, it’s totally borked up and is incredibly frustrating to players and admins. Either have NO difficulty scaling at all or have it work in a nice linear method JUST LIKE ARK. Why does it have to be this bad?
o As it stands now, animals don’t gain XP if they are above a certain wild level. Difficulty scaling totally borks Alphas to be unkillable and able to kill everything. Why does having wild 150 animals mean we have level 1160+ Alphas that cannot be killed unless u glitch them or trap them somewhere.
o The entire system needs a massive overhaul. In my opinion separate out wild animal levels scaling and alpha scaling. Also break out SOTD and AOTD treasure maps. Some high level AOTD are immune to all damage or only take a single point.
o Some survivors from high level SOTD disappear after you “claim them”. Again, difficulty scaling problems.
Ship stats
· I understand that “official servers” need to maintain a balance. However, you should know by now that this game will be make or break on the unofficial servers. ALL ship stats need to be fully exposed in ini files. Servers need an easy way to adjust these. This is an absolute must; mods will never work well for this and it needs to be a priority change. Many players and servers play a more PVE style and creative style. Without more ability to easily make these changes you lose long term playability. The single biggest complaint I have from players on all the PVE and creative side is this issue. Along with borked animal taming but this one issue is huge. Ships are ATLAS, you have to do better here.
o Changes needed, exposed stat settings like that exists for player/animal stats.
o Ini control of ship base speeds, including backup speed.
o Ini control of each sail type/size.
o Ini control of each ship type, number of sail “points” i.e. how many points each ship has for sails, larger sails costing more points etc.
o Ini control for expanding builds outside boundaries or expanding the boundary by X factor. This obviously can’t work in all servers but if I want to have a server where I can build crazy ships then, if this is a sandbox game there should be a setting too allow that.
Server map systems
This is a big topic and I don’t have enough coding experience to know exactly what changes are needed but this is probably the single biggest issue facing Atlas. As it stands right now you can now play single player or non-dedicated with the full official map. Or try the actual official servers. However, unofficial servers are basically non-existent for truly large maps. The game is designed for a large map. The official 15x15 is 225 shards/servers. As it stands now it costs thousands of dollars to have the hardware capable of running a full 15x15 server. So, we have these smaller ones. The problem is that they don’t deliver the full experience because the game isn’t designed for “small” maps. Blackwood attempts to provide this by having a fully custom experience, but that isn’t much better than non-dedicated because it is too small, resources, quests, etc.
I have tried to come up with ways to make this work. I’ve had a 5x5 custom map designed which I can run on a single “server” albeit one with Dual 8core/16t processors and 192gb of ram. That is an extreme example. It highlights the big issue.
Another workaround that I have been talking with the developer of one of the Atlas Server Utilities about is a hybrid solution. Have a Set number of shards say a 3x3 as a “permanent” online server. This server is running the 15x15 map. Using a discord integration, a player can send a command to a bot to boot up shards F3, F4, F5, etc. This in turn would have those shards boot up for X amount of time and shutdown XX minutes after no players are detected. Something that could be configured for each server integration.
Some hurdles are when a player logs off on a temporary shard and that shard shuts down if the player forgets what shard they are in, there needs to be a way to see last known location. This is complicated by a bug with Atlas that player locations are buggy. Often players will be shown online in several shards at once when they are not there. This is likely due to some issue with Redis not sending back data to the shards when a player moves to a new shard. Often this is seen when a “sleeping” logged off player is moved to a new shard on a moving ship. Although it occurs without that happening as well.
Another option is for Grapeshot too develop a better server system that integrates some of the features of the single player/non-dedicated experience.
Custom maps and the quests. This is got to be the messiest part of having custom maps, trying to integrate the quests and locations correctly. It can be done but it is so damn messy and when new content gets added it frequently must be done again. This needs to be fixed. A re-write of how quests are tracked internally in the game needs to happen. When a server admin must spend more time on upkeep than playing the game or simply cannot because of IRL things like a JOB, and Family, then the game just gets dropped.
In closing, I want to stress that this post is just my opinion, though many parts are shared by the players who have player on my servers. Along with other server admins I have spoken too on the various discord servers. Generally, the conscious is that Atlas has great potential but as it stands now it just isn’t worth the time, money, and aggravation.
Any constructive opinions are welcome.

Economy is the key to success for atlas:
-marketplaces on freeports to sell resources, items, ships and tames
And serverwide connection of those stores (ex: all 4 stores in a Freeport server share the same goods etc)
So people have more acces points and blocking is not that easy
If this results in massive server overpopulation you can split freeports servers into 4 own server (triangles)
-storehouse on freeports for companies (and private) where people can bring their stuff and store gold and from which transactions are calculated
-gold generation! More ways for gold to get into the game
-gold consumption! (maybe companies have to pay for the amount of crewmembers, a big safe (structure) to store money for company <= only one per comp) great for smaller ones and big company size is expensive, need for more interactions
-blackboard in freeports for comps to recruit new players and new players find comps for joining or renting)
This is important, finding a safe place to life should not be a long and frustrating procedure
-private message ability: pigeons maybe + pigeon house where messages can be read
Comes with the blackboard, people must have a way to contact those companies who offer recruitment or renting
-and a tavern on freeports where you can buy Crewmember that spawn ON your ship, there is no need at all that they spawn in the middle of the island and have to follow us, especially if the freeports get more crowded. Crewmember selling guy asking on which ship you want to have them and if you buy them they will be there
-if above is implemented QUIT farming events like x4 to not f**k up economy!
Why? Because this is not ark, even it feels like it it got special needs to work, it's an MMO(Interaction) where the first M stands for Massive what means 'a lot' and so there needs to be a lot of interactions available (especially some not completely frustrating ones)
And why economy in a pirate game? Because there is no piracy without economy.. Think about history ^^
Atm people have no reason to drive with a ship other than discovering or treasure maps, travels are long and not even exciting, encounters are rare and if then totally random. With economy you can calculate an encounter of you wish to have one, you can set traps or patrol routes of trading ships. And if lucky you will also get a reward for being a pirate! And you also have a reason to use ships which rizes the traffic on the seas because people want to get their peace of the trading cake and sell their resources or maybe they want to buy a super nice blueprint ship? Or a bred tiger! This economy change forces people to get out there for a reason, and make some money with what they have on their own island, perfect
I tried to think about all the content to fit into the game as it already is so that there is no need of another wipe
With those things implemented there are a lot of new opportunities even for new players and for smaller comps

Some suggestions on things that could be add during Early Access besides balancing and bug fixing.
Update: I integrated all ideas into the first post for better readability.
Ships Brig
The current brig is just an expensive schooner. It needs a bit more gunports, there are still planks left that could fit a gunport and maybe they can be moved a bit closer together to at least have 10 gunports per side. Also the ships rail need to be lower so the deck guns don’t stick through it.
Frigate A medium ship to fill the Gap between Schooner/Brig and Galleon. Having one or two gundecks with a total of 20 gunports per side. Ship of the Line
A Flagship having about 3 or 4 complete gundecks and are extremely expensive even compared to the Galleon. Large companies need some kind of flagships as the normal galleon have become quiet common.
Huge Sails The Large sails in the game are the right size for a brig but they are way too small for galleons and look rather stupid on them. The mast above the deck should atleast have a height of about the length of the ship. Sail Crew
Ability to have more crew assigned to a sail. Open/close and turn much slower with one crew and faster with multiple crew, also having a speed buff for multiple crew on the sails or player manning the sail. Multiple Sails
You should be at least able to add different sails to the same mast, like a handling sail and a speed sail on one mast.
Ship details Besides planks and gunports there should be windows and balconies to design your ship especially at the stern like the real ships.
Also when placing walls inside a ship hull they should fill the gap to the hull. Man stations by demand
Option to set npc crew to man stations by demand. If you anchor they should unman stations and repair if you issue orders to an unmanned sail or cannon they will man the station or switch from another station that has no orders issued right now. Weather forecast
Give a warning a few minutes before the weather changes and add skills that increase the warning period. Ship sinking Besides removing ways a ship should not sink. Ships should be more resistant to sinking, so you can shoot them to pieces and loot them more often than sinking them.
For this there should be a general resistance for planks so you don’t sink by a single plank been hit two times.
If a plank looses hp it will gain damage resistance. If it lost 50% hp it will have 50% resistance if it lost 99% hp it will have 99% resistance. But resistance will be reduced by a modifier resembling your ships condititon. All planks hp together will be the ships condition and if you lost for example 50% of the overall hp on all planks your ships condition will be 50% which will reduce all resistances your planks have by 50%. So the more damage your ship has taken the more easier it is to break a plank or damage it further but if your ship is in perfect condition planks will be very resistant to breaking. (would also require to adjust repair speed)
Suggestion: (All ideas need to be applied together to work correctly, given numbers are not set in stone and need to be tested and balanced)
Planks Planks need to take more damage they are destroyed far too easy by any means. Planks should be able to take a lot more shots including all sources be it from player weapons or SoD. Considering a wooden wall taking 80 wood having 8.000 hp it wouldnt be wrong if a large plank taking 1500 wood would have 150.000 hp. So atleast bit more hp on planks would make a lot of sense.
Ship Health / Resistance The ship health will no longer resemble the amount of water the ship has taken in but the ships condition (The sum of all planks HP). The ships condition grants a resistance buff to planks and reduces when damage to planks is taken. Resistance Buff / Sturdiness
Planks have a damage resistance with the following formula: Ship HP% - Plank HP% + Sturdiness Bonus
- Example: Ships Condition at 100%, Plank at 100%, Sturdiness 0% = Resistance 0%
- Example: Ships Condition at 90%, Plank at 10%, Sturdiness 0% = Resistance 80%
- Example: Ships Condition at 10%, Plank at 100%, Sturdiness 10% = Resistance -80%
- Example: Ships Condition at 80%, Plank at 40%, Sturdiness 10% = Resistance 50%
Ship Weight / Water Weight If a ship takes in water the water will be added to the weight. Also the weight will have more influence how fast a ship can turn, accelerate and move. Draught / Load Draft
The weight of the ship no matter if it is from resources, cannons or water will make the ship go deeper and raise the water line. Obviously the ship will sink when the waterline raises above the bulwark. Water Leaks
The ship can only take in water from leaks below the water line. If a plank is partially below the water line the inflow of water will be slower. Bulkhead
You should be able to build bulkheads that divide the ship into sections and prevent water inflow from the front section to reach the mid or aft sections. Also a fully closed deck will prevent water from reaching the upper deck. To have water inflow on the mid deck the waterline need to be high enough to reach said deck and leaks need to be present on the planks. Repairing Planks
Planks can no longer be destroyed. If a plank reaches 0 HP it will be turned into a burst plank. A burst plank will take 3 successful hits with the repair hammer to start repairing again and will take a reasonable amount of resources with every try. Only fully repaired planks can be replaced with a new plank or demolished. Burst planks will make a damaged ship look a lot better and act like a missing plank in case of shots going through them and water leaking in but dont allow a new plank to be placed for easy repair. Visible Damage
If bulkheads and decks stopping water inflow planks can have more conditions to make combat look better and easily tell the their condition:
<50% light visible damage and tiny water leak
<25% visible damage and small water leak
<10% heavy visible damage and medium water leak
0% visible burst plank with large water leak Ship Sails
Once a mast gets destroyed it gets replaced with a broken mast that has like a 10 minute cooldown before it can be repaired. Same if a sail gets completely ripped it will have a 5 minute cooldown before it can be repaired again to allow boarding actions. The same applies as to planks and it takes 3 successful repair hammer hits to start repairing once the cooldown is over and you cannot demolish or replace a sail/mast until it is fully repaired. Wind
Sails do take damage from strong winds, starting at 50% of the max wind strength they will have a tiny wear effect and at 100% it will be quit noticeable. Cyclones of course deal a lot damage to sails but less to planks so you can lower sails if you cannot avoid them.
Cannon Balls Since battles last longer now they should be a bit cheaper and reasonably lighter to carry enough. Avoiding abuse of the weight mechanic
On anchored ships the weight that a player can add to a ship is limited to two times his carry weight. Should the ship lift the anchor the full weight is applied.
On PVE you can remove sleeping players if you own the ship, they will be moved to the end of the emergency ladder if selecting to remove some overweight sleeper that tries to stall your ship indefinitely. Repair All Add an option for ships to repair everything at a very low speed using materials from the ship inventory if you hit it with a hammer it will increase the speed.
World Island diversity
Additional Island to expand the world and give more room and options for players. Free Islands
Civilian Islands with a neutral NPC claim for everyone to live on and maybe a NPC settlement for trading etc. Exploration Islands
Islands you cant build on, just for exploring and the real pirate feeling. Claimable Islands
Normal Islands to fight for. Pirate Nest
Starter Islands for Pirates no protection and no limitations. Map rearrangement or special server (PVP/PVE Merge)
All starter areas are on the west side. The farther you move east the higher level the enemies and the better the rewards and the rarer the resources get. First rows are lawless areas, next rows are PVE, then some rows with PVP with offline protection and last full PVP sectors. Could also add an exploration sector where you cannot build and find rarest stuff on expeditions to truly uninhabited islands. Golden Age Islands are mixed into this map with different difficulties as well. NPC Factions
Having some factions to liven up the world. (All using real ships/versions of the playerships) Civilian
NPC Trader ships and Settlements. Offering buildspots in the city or free building on the rest of the island. Navy
Having forts and military ports. Guarding the sea from pirates and ships of the damned. Pirates
NPC pirates attacking players and traders. You can yield and they take your wares or a bribe and don’t sink your ship for no reason, unless you fight back. Having pirate nests where player pirates can get services and stuff also sell slaves or stolen goods. Damnation
Ships of the damned turned into real ships and only appearing during night time Faction Areas and settlements
Factions have areas in which they are more numerous and the farther away from their area the rarer they appear. Ships of the damned for example only appear in certain areas at night while in the other areas there are npc pirates and in some areas there are only few hostile ships and a strong navy presence. Underwater “Islands” (Additional world layers) There should be natural air bubbles(caves) and player made domes under water where you can live. Also ancient cultures could have left artificial or magic domes that provide a place to live.
Similar to an island with resource spawns and wildlife etc. these will expand the space to live in the game and bring more life to the sea bed as well as base of operation for the upcoming subs.
There could be bigger subs (comparable to the surface ships) for traveling and transporting that launch the mini subs for resource collection and other under water tasks. Should airships be added some day the same could be done with floating islands to expand the space to live into the sky.
The battlefields and playfields should be mainly separated so that sea, air, land and underwater battles not significantly interfere with each other:
Surface Ships – strong hull, can carry heavy weapons and lots of resources, get new weapons like basic depth charges that are very effective against submarines and basic anti-air cannons that easily down airships. Of course more ship types here is a primary goal.
Land – large fortifications and heavy weapons also can use anti-air cannons
Submerged – have weak hulls and can only carry light weapons that cause little damage to surface ships planks but good damage to other subs. Can also use small deck guns when not diving to participate in surface battles but still way weaker than surface ships.
Floating – lightweight airships, cannot carry much stuff and only lighter weapons good for air combat and reaching floating islands but with low effect on surface ships.
4 different experiences and battlefields to master and expand the game content and many more cool places to visit. Quests and World Tasks Add NPC in Towns that give Quests for a Gold reward. As well as quests on the fly you can find in the world. Exploration Quest
Visit a certain island and cartograph it. Return to Questgiver for reward. Exploration Tasks
World tasks, pieces of a (exploration) treasure maps are appearing on one island. If you explore the island you will randomly find the pieces if you have enough pieces to combine into a map it will lead to a treasure chest on this island. If you picked up the treasure chest it will have a long cooldown but you can do the same on every island to encourage exploration. Trading Quest
Deliver certain materials to a faraway NPC town for a Gold reward. Special Trading Quest
Transport a certain item or person from one Port to another. Salvage Quest
Bring certain item found on a shipwreck to questgiver. Salvage Task
Find a treasure Map that points toward a shipwreck for salvage. Rescue Task
Find shipwrecked npcs and bring them to any town for a small reward, or enslave them and sell them in a pirate nest.
And many more like combat quests, creature hunt, boarding trader ships or capturing civilian/navy ships… Dungeons:
Player limit for dungeons. The game has everything from single players up to 400ppl tribes, its impossible to balance so there should be dungeons for different team sizes.
The limit allows only so many people inside the dungeon at the same time and the content inside is balanced on that number.
(max 2) Tiny dungeon - small with basic loot and suitable for one or two persons. Low chance for specials like fountain of youth, gold or rare stuff (including all mechanics of the game so everyone can take part and is not excluded). Many of these do exist on all islands.
(max 4) Small dungeon - normal dungeon for a small group, hard but doable alone. Normal chance for specials. Many of these do exist on all islands.
(max Normal dungeon - normal dungeon for a medium group. Normal chance for specials. Many of these do exist on all islands.
(max 16) Large dungeon - large dungeon with strong bosses for large groups. High chances for specials and rare loot. They only exist on special islands or zones.
(max 32) Huge dungeon - large dungeon with strong bosses for large groups. High chances for specials and rare loot. They only exist on special islands or zones.
(max 64) Raid dungeon - large dungeon with world bosses for huge crews. Very high chances for specials and rare loot. They only exist on special islands or zones.
More versatile dungeons (instances)
Different Caves (like in game already)
Under Water Caves (having air to breath once inside but also parts that are under water)
Shipwreck (in shallow water or deep in the ocean)
Ghostship (once disabled you can go inside or drifting ships with enemies)
Tempel or other buildings
Hostile Settlements or island counting as open dungeon
Under water city inside an air bubble
... Law System If you kill other players outside of company wars (add company wars of course) you will get a bounty on your head depending on what you did, a little for killing a player and more for sinking a ship or stealing a claim. If you live like a pirate you will be flagged as one.
Bounties can be collected by players that capture you and hand you to the navy or you get attacked by navy ships. Bounty will only decline if you are imprisoned but not from dying and respawning. Of course you can escape relatively easy if you don’t want to stay imprisoned for a long time but you keep your bounty that way.
Also include special starter islands/ pirate nests for players with a high bounty on their head. Player condition Green - Everyone is a green player from the start. Yellow - When you attack a green or yellow player you will turn into a yellow player. Yellow players turn green again a few minutes after they last did damage to other players. Red - When you have a significant bounty by a npc faction on your head you will turn red. Only by loosing the bounty you can turn green again. Red players can only use Homeservers in pirate territory.
Note that player bounties alone will not make a player turn red. So player bounties on green players can only be turned in by red players, pirates.
Bounty (What is a bounty) Bounty is a gold amount on your head set by either the npc faction in which territory you commit a crime or by a player. Different factions do consider different things a crime.
Crime (What gives you a bounty)
- Killing green player, tiny bounty. (Except pirate territory)
- Destroying building parts of others, tiny bounty. (Except pirate territory)
- Stealing from locked containers, small bounty. (Except pirate territory)
- Attacking ship, small bounty. (Except pirate territory) (Medium bounty in Trader faction territory)
- Sinking ship, huge bounty. (Except pirate territory) (Medium bounty in Navy faction territory)
- Taking green or yellow players as prisoner, large bounty. (Except pirate territory) (Medium bounty in Navy faction territory)
- Player placing bounty on your head.
- Killing yellow and red players, no bounty
- Attacking red ships (ships of red players), no bounty
- Sinking red ships, small bounty (Only in pirate territory)
- Escaping a cage, small bounty (Except pirate territory) Jail & Debuff (How to loose bounties)
A bounty will reduce when the player is online and sitting in a cage owned by the npc faction, player or company that placed the bounty. You can relatively easy escape a cage after a short while if you don’t want to sit idle but your bounty will no longer decline and you get a small amount added on top of it for escaping. You have to flee the area as well so your company rescuing you would be an option.
If their head is delivered instead and the bounty is paid they will receive a debuff that reduces xp, damage the player deals, harvest and taming rates significantly. The debuff will contain the amount of bounty that got paid doubled and every goldcoin the player picks up will automatically be used to pay of the debuff until it is gone. Players remain red while they have the debuff.
Bounties will also reduce naturally with time but very slow. Payment (How to get paid)
Obviously the debuff or jail time must hit significantly harder than the bounty is worth to prevent misuse.
Deliver the head or the player alive to a npc faction headquarter to receive the bounty placed by the npc faction. Bonus money for alive players.
Deliver the head or player alive to the player or company that placed a bounty on its head. Be aware that players or companies can refuse to pay the bounty, so skilled bounty hunters need some measures to bargain
That’s about the basic bounty system for players.
I like the idea of company or ship bounties.
On top of this there could be more bounty systems:
Company bounty The company bounty is the cumulated bounty of its players and will decide if a company will turn red as a whole including all members. If player looses its bounty or is removed from the company it will also be removed from the company bounty.
Ship bounty If you earn a bounty while a ship owned by you or your company is close by the ship will earn the same bounty, plus players can also add bounties on a ship directly. If a ship with a bounty is sunk you will earn this bounty. Again the owner of the ship will receive a debuff that will take gold from ship boxes the player owns to pay off the debuff. The amount of gold to pay of the debuff is always twice the amount of the bounty that is paid to prevent companies to profit from bounties set on them. Unlike player bounties, ship bounties can be paid off with the normal gold cost at the npc factions. Flags (Yield mechanic) Flag Basic
You can raise a flag on your ship that also influences faction and pvp. It’s especially handy for pvp but also for pve server or areas. Flags have a cooldown before they can be changed again. Flags can also be applied to npc settlements and player claims and have the same rules.
Available flags are:
Trader Flag Is a neutral flag and has no special effect. Hostiles like pirates or factions you have a bad reputation will target you. Company Flag
You represent your company and your deeds will affect its reputation and the standing towards other companies, factions and players and their reputation towards your company if they that take actions against you. You can take actions against hostile companies (declared company war) without earning a bounty on your head.
Faction Flag You represent an NPC faction and can sail their waters and use their ports but are hunted by their enemies. Flags of factions are only available if you have a good enough standing with that faction. (Your reputations with said faction will increase from doing quests for npcs in ports and your reputation will decline if attacking faction ships or npcs.) Pirate Flag
You will go hostile to all around you including unallied pirates and can take pirate actions but will earn a bounty on your head if you do so. No one will get a bounty for attacking a pirate, you cannot lower the flag for a while after raising it. The pirate flag will be forced if your bounty is too high making you a well-known pirate. Navy Flag
You will be hostile to pirates and players with bounties, while everyone can attack pirates without a penalty, pirates can fight of navy ships without a penalty. Navy ships have an escape blocking aura. If you die within the aura around a hostile navy ship you will be forced to respawn in a bed that is also within this aura if you don’t have a bed in range you will pass out and can be taken prisoner. White Flag
Raising the white flag will yield to enemies, npcs and players alike. Your sails will be closed and all abroad will be forced to kneel down so you cannot fight. Attacking a ship or npc that has yielded and sinking it will have very high bounty penalty excluding pirate ships. A yielded ship will unlock all containers and doors and can be looted by player pirates as much as they like to. Hostile NPCs will come alongside yielded ships and transfer a part or all content of boxes and inventories depending on reputation and faction, npc pirates and the legion of the damned will also take your crew. Player pirates can take over yielded ships and enslave the crew but it will earn them a very high bounty that’s not worth the gain unless you are among the few most famous pirates that can keep fighting of everything that will be after you. (Ships should not be sunk for no reason, that very important to make the world evolve)
Reputation You should be able to trade even with a neutral standing and earn a bit of reputation depending on the faction. Trader factions give more reputation for trading but another source of reputation are the quest npc in towns that can give you trade runs but also combat, salvage or exploration missions which earn you a bigger reputation and gold reward on completing. The local market in npc towns having different prices allows to play as a trader if you want and earn gold if you reach a port with the right wares to sell with a bargain.
Unlike civil flags of course a combat faction like the navy or pirates do require you to fight their enemies to earn their flag and makes you enemies with the other faction from sinking their ships.
Upkeep & Decay & Taxes
New item resource-stack (like the ship resource-box). Repair hammer will automatically use resources from the resource-stack in the building. Like ships every building can have one resource-stack.
Ships and buildings will now decay very fast. The resource-box and resource-stack will automatically use resources to counter that decay (upkeep). There is a minimum upkeep for every box or stack to maintain itself, additional it will charge a cost for the amount of pieces the ship or building has attached. Zones mechanics:
Freeport – No building, cannot anchor ships in the port area. No de-spawn timer or faster decay needed.
Lawless – Upkeep cost will keep buildings from decaying.
Claimed Citizen – The upkeep cost will go towards the taxes and the ship or building stays in shape. No or low taxes on basic resource collection, normal taxes on gold treasures.
Claimed Owner – No building and ship decay or upkeep for the owner and allies. Significant gold upkeep for the claim itself.
Exploration Zones – No building, ships upkeep like in lawless.
This will allow the server to get cleared fast from abandoned stuff including ships.
It will also allow player that want to go on vacation to put enough resources into the box for whatever time frame they will be away.
Foundation spamming is effectively countered as they will decay fast and it is costly to put a resource-stack for every foundation and keep it filled with the minimum upkeep.
This versatile system, will allow to avoid bad experiences with de-spawn timers, foundation spamming, too expensive, cheap, long or short upkeep phases. And allows new players easy access as in all Zones the same system applies, upkeep & decay always at the same rates.
Trading, crafting and resources Quality
Crafting stuff will result in different quality. Better skill and higher tier resources will produce better results -> a ship plank from strong wood is better than one from soft wood. Crafting skills
Add crafting skills that slightly reduce the required mats. Maybe different skills for every kind of material like metal or wood. Containers
Containers have a maximum weight limit so you actually cant throw everything into one container.
Containers can be moved, smalls ones by hand and carts and big ones with cranes(add cranes for this) and large carts. Trader counter
A build and placeable counter where you can place items and set a price on them to buy or sell works when manned by player or npc crew. Freight Box
When you access a player shop or trade hub you will have access and can select all inventories of your freight boxes in the vicinity of the shop to trade the wares or buy them. For example your ship needs to be in the harbor and every trade will take a while to commence (unloading). Trade Hub/Port
The trade hub/port is a central coastal building that will show all offers of player shops in the vicinity and will also allow players to put their wares up for sale without upkeep but paying a tax when it is sold. The sales tax can be set by the owner and is limited to 30%. Every day the offer is not sold the tax will increase by 5% when it reaches 100% the offer is taken down and the wares belong to the owner of the trade hub.
The trade hub has a reasonable upkeep for the owner. While the player shops/shacks will have far less upkeep, preferable they should decay and need to be repaired with resources not gold. Renting and Trading
Allow to rent rooms or buy content of chests by asking a gold amount to unlock a door or chest. Npc settlements
Liven up trade buy having npc cities with traders that buy and sell with different prices and demand and might give trade requests to players that are rewarded with extra gold upon delivery. Workstations
A new basic workstation that is easily build and move most none primitive part from inventory crafting to this station and the smithy.
Crafting stations now take more time to produce parts and do not manufacture until manned by a player or npc crew. Faster crafting skills affecting crafting tasks set by the player with the skill, npc manufacture much slower than the player when using the stations. NPC workforce
Possibility to set hired npcs to slowly collect resources independently in a certain area around a collection box.
As long as you can protect them you will be able to skip on the most boring part of the game and get mats for a new ship with enough time. Backpacks and stuff
Craftable backpacks that increase carry capacity. Items in backpacks have their weight reduced.
Bags to be placed in inventories reducing weight of items inside. Can also be placed on the ground, carts...
Saddlebags increasing carry capacity and reduce weight of items inside.
Normal inventory reduced carry capacity but include very basic bags and backpacks that can already be crafted on starter islands and boost it to about the current basic level. Creatures Normal Creatures
- Reduced Size to real size
- Normal wildlife, plentiful, less aggressive
- normal behavior, wolves hunt at night rest during the day etc.
- tameable, some smaller versions like wolves are not rideable, can be tamed faster than the current taming speed
- levelrange, every creature can spawn at levels considering their strength and size:
chicken lv 1-20
wolf lv 20-60
tiger lv 50-100
elephant lv 50-80
Alpha Creatures
- using the current size(oversized) of creatures
- tameable, but take more time to be tamed
- rideable, for example alpha wolves are rideable unlike the normal sized ones
- creatures picked to spawn as alpha will double their level and receive a health buff (health buff does not carry over to tamed ones)
- alphas can be accompanied by a pack of normal creatures, for example a pack of wolves following an alpha wolf
- only appropriate alphas, no alpha chickens and stuff
Omega Creatures
- rare and strong monsters of large size like dragons and other beasts. if you come across one while exploring the jungle you be running for your life
- only hunt them in groups (introduce a tracking skill so they can remain rare sights)
- if one is found trigger an local event everyone can join in to fight together (separate loot for all participants)
Titan Creatures
- like the kraken, only for massive groups
- big monsters or large group of enemies like an undead army
- unlike the kraken they also appear randomly triggering world events for everyone to attend
- can attack islands and all need to band together to fend them off, will disappear after a while if not defeated (there will be a warning a few days before the creature attacks like dead fish on the beach, bubbles in the water, strange weather or an undead armada on the horizon...)
- is a natural replacement for decay, instead of buildings and ships getting deleted after a while they will get damaged or destroyed by titan attacks and are more likely to happen on heavily inhabited islands but no more than once a month per island Behavior
- attack delay, for example a shark will not attack as soon as you contact the water surface but start circling you for a bit bevor attacking, a wolf will tail you and team up with nearby wolves and is more likely to attack when turning your back on it, etc. General
- need more creatures to liven up the world in the long term
- tameable LotD with tarot skills, give us undead breeding, be the first Taming
New taming mechanic optional or replacement however you see fit.
Activate taming skill and hold out the food. This will prevent creatures you look at from getting aggro on you or fleeing from you, does only work if they dont reacted to you already so you have to start from far away with agressive creatures and always look at them to keep them from reacting in the normal way(aggro/flee).
Creatures will also flee or attack with a certain chance that depends on your sneaking skill and how fast you move towards them. Once you reach them there is a chance they will eat the food depending on its quality and what kind of food you are offering. Agressive creatures will attack when rejecting the food.
You have to repeat until the taming bar is full, if attacked you have to flee and loose aggro to continue taming or if it stays in the game you continue with the bola method. Weapons and Armor Dual Wield Dual wield swords and daggers and add daggers. Cant do something wrong with this its an always welcomed feature.
You should also be able to dual wield every one handed item. Like a grappling hock in one hand and a sword in the other so you can attack when you swing over to an enemy ship. Also it would make guns more viable as you are not defenseless against meele while holding one.
Maybe with a meele rebalance that does allow for less slashing and more parrying it will feel even more authentic and fun. Unarmed﻿/martial arts
Add kicks and combo moves to make unarmed fighting more viable with knockbacks and combos for some additional effects like stunning or knock down. + Ability to disarm enemies. Job armor and clothes
Every job should have appropriate clothing, light and warm version.
For example dancers shouldn’t be dancing around in fur armor or ship builders in metal armor.
Outfits give bonuses to the corresponding profession and liven up the world.
Magic
Since magic will be added some ideas for magic types and purposes
Necromancy – Recruiting/summoning and controlling an army of the dead crew. Transforming into an undead yourself -> undead don’t need air and can live under water. Able to resurrect dead players and npc crew as undead crew. Turn your ship into a ghost ship, able to dive (cannons don’t work under water thou but good for surprise appearance)
Voodoo – Cursing weapons, ships, players and animals and lifting curses, changing the weather/wind (bad)
Divine – Blessing weapons, ships, players, animals or harvest, changing the weather/wind (good) SkilltreeAs a long time goal a rework of the xp system would be preferable. ﻿
There will be different XP for the different skill trees.
For example building a ship gives you seamanship xp and sailing a ship gives captaineering xp or hitting with a meele weapon gives meele weaponry xp…
-> If you build ships you become a better ship builder, if you fight a lot you become a better fighter and so on.
This comes along with a rework of xp amounts so you make some worthy progress with each action, where building a ship for 8 hours gives you as much progress with seamanship as killing creatures for 8 hours gives weapon xp.
Also the skill-trees are expanded to give more passive bonuses and active skills with every tree for a more in depth specialization above the basics. Player Conditions Player wounds and weight ﻿Introduce heavy wounds, heavy overweight - both force you to crawl so you cannot interact with for example ladders with heavy overweighting and stuff.Limb damage effects - reducing meele damage (a﻿rms), accuracy (head), stamina (chest) or walking/dodging (l﻿egs). Aging
When you die of old age you will have to make a new character but keep your progress level and exploration and ships etc. and get to respect your character once. (No respect on level up anymore)
When you die of old age and have a child you can choose to play as the child and will also keep levels, exploration and ships etc. with a free respect. Depending on how well the child was raised you will get a permanent stat bonus to your lineage like more health or stamina.
When using the fountain of youth you will get a free respect and are young again.

When you open the mini map and you are in someone else’s claim area, the little red x that shows your position on the minimap is very close to the red color of the claim area. This makes it very difficult to see where you are on the mini map.
if we could have the color of the red x changed, maybe simply black will be enough, this would improve the visibility.

it is my belief that both the NPC shipwrecks and the player made shipwrecks need work to become a useful game element; at the moment NPC shipwrecks are literally the worst at everything; they lack valuable resources in their random cargo, they may have a low end blueprint, and usually have a handful of gold coins. when you compare these generated wrecks to the other sources of valuable loot like maps and flotsam you quickly begin to realize their uselessness. On the other hand the player shipwrecks can often have great wealth aboard, but they should still be improved to elevate salvage work into something worth doing. these are my suggestions for generally improving salvaging in general
NPC shipwrecks-
NPC ships need to be overhauled to make them a worthwhile source of resources and to become more interesting in general. the first step to this is to add more types of loot to be found on these ships; make the wrecks have the ability to support multiple loot chests throughout the ship; and add more types of loot chests themselves. things like a ship resource box filled with raw supplies like wood, metal, thatch, ect. a gold strongbox filled with...... gold? lol.... also could contain some sort of gems and crystal as well. food larders filled with advanced food items and medicine. adding these different boxes would make shipwrecks have much more value to everyone; a source of wealth, supplies, and raw supplies. my second addition to these shipwrecks would be to change the appearance of these wrecks; i'd like to see them as larger, and styled to fit the loot within them... a cargo ship shouldn't be carrying massive quantities of gold, and a warship shouldn't have a stone shipment aboard... have the general loot contained within a shipwreck make sense with the type of wreck. i'd also love to see wrecks themed after SOTD...
Player shipwrecks-
these sunken vessels can contain great wealth in gold, resources, and blueprints but it seems a waste to demo the actual structure of the wreck itself; we should be able to salvage the ship itself with some risk involved. what i'd like to see is the ability to make a floatation device that can be placed on the hull of a shipwreck... when these are attached it gives the ability to "raise" a wreck to the surface allowing us to repair and reuse sunken ships. this would have to be balanced of course give it a chance of failure depending on the quality of the floatation devices used... failing to raise a wreck could cause the ship to break apart and despawn in a few days. the ability to salvage and reuse sunken ships would become a important part of surviving well in game; nothing like attackers leaving almost free ships for you!
combinations? -
we could also use the ability to raise wrecks on NPC shipwrecks; allow us to gain certain unbuildable ship types... of cource we would have to make the NPC shipwrecks be actual ships.
thanks for reading.... i'll be editing this based off of the replies to this thread before actually putting this into the suggestions forum.

There has always been cheating in these online survival games and no company has been able to successfully stop it. Either because of a failure or shortcoming in anti cheat software or simply due to ingenuity of cheat designers, it's harmful to the community causing many players to give up, as well as hindering further game development as devs have to police and track down cheaters. If someone gets banned they have to get a new account and with it a new version of the game which isn't that bad. I suggest a system that checks and keep records of gpu id numbers, and prevents ids that have been banned from playing. Therefore If they get caught cheating they have to replace their entire gpu to play again. This will cost so much money i believe it will stop cheating entirely and allow everyone to have a fun and fair experience.

Now before this gets picked apart by random people on the internet who just want to troll around and insult people for their opinions let me start by saying that I love this game. However i do have some suggestions i think would be amazing if GS integrated them into their current system. Most if not all of my opinions would greatly improve the experience most solo/small companies have in and create unique and fun challenges for companies to overcome. Since this IS early access I figured this would be the only time to throw some suggestions out there. And again I am not a programmer/developer so I don't know how difficult these suggestions would be to implement they are just fun idea I think about while playing that would improve the game in some way.
More crew options
For starters this is one of the most ambitious games I have ever played and has a ton of potential but as stated above a few tweaks to the system could help this game topple most other games in the genre. First of which is the crew system. As it stands now the crew system is pretty good, go to a Freeport or kill ghost ships to acquire more crew to man your ships or mount guns to defend your base. But I would suggest building upon the foundation of the system and AI of the crew to add more immersion and customization to the game.
Similar to what the thrall system is in conan exiles, GS could add crew npc's that are not just static npc's the the same behaviors. I suggest adding a system that implements new crew that are proficient in different categories. I.e. crew members that are better suited to man sails but not good at maning cannons or turrets. Or npc's that are well suited for base defense so you can leave an army of npc's in your base to defend it while offline on cannons or armed with swords/bows/guns on foot to meet the invaders. The Ai could possibly function similar to the army of the damned. And while stationed or positioned where they are best suited, the npc's would receive a buff of some sort maybe extra damage or faster turning on sails ect. (And I know you can spec into Captaineering to get talented crew but this would save on skill points)
Just picture you are a solo player and you have a little base a few defensive structures but not much else around to keep you safe. Now a bigger crew tries to raid you. They blow up your defenses and storm the beach. But this time you have an army of crew members armed to the teeth somewhere in your base to help fight back. This creates a little more excitement and protection for the little guys and more gameplay for the bigger tribes where they can't just overwhelm the solo/small tribes with little to no resistance.
Or on the open ocean you have crew on board not just on sails or cannons but armed with fire arrows and swords to help you fight back enemies when they board your ship. And they will hopefully be good enough to actually put up a fight while defending.
Drop anchor at an enemy base and have a horde of npc's follow you into battle.
While currently you can place crew on the steering wheel. What if you improve on the idea by being able to program a destination. You can have trade routes that will allow the auto pilot to sail to the nearest free port or a marker that you place. Allowing for smaller companies to send automated shipments or supplies to other bases or ports. And similar to the current playershops can sell goods when they are docked.
Don't like farming or just don't have the time or man power to farm hundreds of trees for resources? Have crew members specialized in gathering. These crew members could be set to wander and gather wood/thatch/stone ect around your base and place the resources in a designated resource bin. (This can be done in some way in a similar way like pretty much any RTS in the past almost 30 years)
These additional crew types would cut down on the grindiness this game has and improve the overall gameplay especially for smaller companies.
Now how would you acquire these new crew? Simple, for starters go to a Freeport like normal to get lower grade (common) crew in each specialization. And I have to point out conan exiles again. But for higher tiers you would have to complete harder and more time consuming quest or tasks. I.e. killing ghost ships, completing dungeons, quest, going to the power or any other new content added later. This will give more incentive to complete more endgame task and detract from the zerg mentality of pvp and add a little bit of strategy to the game.
And again this can be done in some way. If you look at gameplay from conan it has already done similar things with the thrall system. To top it off it would pull farther away from just the basic taming system in place currently with animals and make it stand out as more than just "ark 2.0". Could even add a new talent tree specifically for crew so you can either spec down the beastmaster tree or the crew tree.
In short this would improve QOL, allow smaller companies to actually stand a chance and not get destroyed so easily, cuts down on the monotony of farming and adds additional gameplay mechanics.
GIVE ME MORE SHIPS!
Naval warfare is a big reason why a lot of us play in the first place. And while the current ships are enough for early access I think many of us would get bored of the current variety we have now. How many schooners and Brigs can we build before we get tired of the same in game models? Granted there are tons of customization options and builds can try, but how about new ship types or skins.
Skins may just be a cosmetic thing like what you guys are working on for the steering wheel. Would be awesome to see some viking, Greek, or Romam ship skins if not just whole new ship designs. For example a whole new category of ship with sails and oars/oarsmen. Built for speed with possibly having rams on the front for ramming enemy ships for massive damage.
Adding rams of some form would drastically change naval warfare as it is in game currently. Having to sacrifice speed and weight to place a heavy metal ram on the front of your ship. Forced to make tactical decisions whether to add a ram and strip down some decks or add stronger oarsmen (crew) for speed. Could be similar to the rhino if you command your oarsman to pick up speed in order to land a crushing blow.
Speaking of decks. How about the ability to customize the decks we have on ships. As in a cargo deck that, like the cargo racks from the may update reduce weight of items or workstations put on them. Or a deck designed to preserve food and refuse spoil timers for traders shipping their goods. Or a weapons deck that increases damage done by any cannon/torpedoe placed on it. (this would help disrupt the current meta of placing a ton of cannons on ceilings to overwhelm your opponent). or a deck with temp control for when it gets too hot or too cold.
Not saying the current old English/British styled ships are a bad thing, I know it's pirate era they are going for just think it would be interesting to see new ship designs. Maybe make new content around the new skins/ships so when you see one you know that crew did something challenging similar to the submarine and the kraken.
These things and more are buzzing around in my head almost every time I play. And you could update the game almost monthly like they did ark back in the day. Again, I know most of this is a long shot but still think these are cool ideas that if implemented could possibly increase sales and the longevity of the game and keep people playing.
This has been my TED talk...

1. Can you please get us an actual NA server possibly in Chicago? Thanks... tired of this German crap.
2. Can you please delete all PVE servers.... thanks... literally no point in playing this game PVE.... like.. what do you even do... build a mansion... invite Bearded John the Strong lvl 1 over for some rum?

It is virtually impossible to find a sweet spot when the animal you are taming continuously hits you. It is impossible to tame some animals, like a giraffe, since every time you get close enough for the feeding spot, the giraffe then attacks you knocking you back. The most feedings I can get in on these creatures (giraffe, elephant, etc) is 3-6, then the creature starts attacking, and the taming percent falls so fast that I need to start over.
Less attacks? Slower percentage loss so that one can get ahead and eventually tame? I tried for an hour today, wasting a lot of beets. The highest I got was 20-something %, then the animal started attacking every time I got near it. By the time it stopped, the percentage would be zero again.
I understand the need for hardcore struggle, but making it impossible will just drive people away from playing out of frustration. Needs balanced?
Also, issue with taming a horse. The run from you far too fast and long for taming. There Is no way to get them in a pen to tame them and no way to tame them in the wild. Best you can hope for is set up a trap and wait until something worthwhile gets in it. There needs to be a different mechanic for taming creatures that run, including lions as they run more than they attack.
Looking forward to a solution. Thank you.

Here are a few of my wishes / suggestions:
1. Real pirates do not sink ships, they seize them and rob! Add a boarding mode for sea battles.
The mode is activated when a boarding hook loaded into the swivel weapon engages the enemy
ship in a close naval battle. I described the entire mode in detail in the “Boarding” section.
2. To ban bots on swiveling guns on ships. Give players the opportunity to land on enemy ships.
3. Balance melee weapons. Blackjack is much more effective than saber and lance. Purple
stunning damage is more effective for players than slow saber strikes and spikes. Stunning at 1
minute is tantamount to killing and even more dangerous. Swords and pikes are useless. Increase
the damage and attack speed of the saber and spikes, otherwise they will not be used, because the
baton worth 20 wood is more effective.
4. Ship guns and gunports no one uses, because big guns are more effective. Enter the limit on
the number of large cannons on the ship, so that players use ship cannons and gunports.
5. Players cover the ships with roofs to protect the cores from the cores; they turn out to be ugly
monsters, not ships. Limit the ability to close the slats roofs, build only up and inside the ship.
6. There is very little variety of ships, there were a lot more sailing ships in history, please add
new ships. And add more varied fittings, not only the bow of the ship, but also the new
appearance of the sails, different steering wheels, beautiful railings, patterns, statues, lanterns,
balconies, so that players can create unique ships that do not look alike. Reduce the weight of
wooden structures on the ship, so that players make not minimalistic ships due to problems with
overload, but can create their own unique ships with cabins, rooms, balconies, etc.
7. Turn off automatic bots shots on ships, let bots shoot at the player’s command
just to make the fights more alive and unpredictable. Bots auto shots in anchor mode only.
8. Fix non-killing bots in the tow. This is a problem, the immortals should not be. Imbalance in
favor of the defenders.
9. Reduce the resistance to damage from the armor, or increase the damage of the firearm on the
armor, killing a player with 6-10 shots from a long-reloading weapon is not normal. The same
thing, increase the damage on animals and bots, killing them from 10-20 shots is awful and
implausible.
10. Allow bots to use firearms (carbine, musket, pistol) to liven up battles and use NPS in
combat as a combat unit, and not only as an application for the functioning of a tow or pivot
weapon. You can give them slow aiming so that they do not hit the running targets and long
reloading so that the bots are not a strong problem for the players. But when a bot is not a useless
servant for stationary guns, but a combat unit from which a detachment can be created and used
when attacking an enemy it will be fabulous fights.
11. Add a debuff after death, for example - 30% to everything within 10 minutes. That people
were afraid to die, engaged in food and the balance of vitamins. Now if there is a bed near, then
no one is watching the food and vitamins, because to die and be reborn next to it is nothing.
People deliberately kill themselves to restore the balance of vitamins or fill the stomach.
Boarding mode
1. You can load boarding hooks into the swiveling weapon on ships.
2. When approaching ships at close range, you can shoot hooks and cling to the enemy ship.
With a successful hit, the boarding mode begins, at which the ships approach, align and stop.
3. Each hook hooked to the enemy ship has a margin of safety and can be destroyed with a melee
weapon. If all hooks are destroyed, the boarding mode is terminated.
4. Under the boarding mode, you cannot open the sails, you cannot shoot from guns and swivel
weapons, you cannot flood your ship and demolish the planks, the resource box and the box for
projectiles are blocked for use.
5. To capture an enemy ship, you need to set a flag on it in boarding mode and protect it for 15
minutes. The defending team can reset the boarding and seizure of the ship by destroying all the
hooks holding their ship or running to the enemy flag on their ship and pressing E to destroy the
flag holding the command for 30 seconds. Any damage to the player resets the process of
destroying the flag and must be re-clamped for 30 seconds.
6. If the attacking team manages to defend their flag on the enemy ship for 15 minutes and save
at least 1 hook, then the enemy ship goes along with its resource box and shells as a reward.

So I played since day one, only PvE, and I start to wonder when will we see real pirate content?
Most time goes to gathering, crafting and buildung. Then you tame and breed to improve you gathering and craft faster.
Then came a little pirate stuff. Took the first ship and went for a sail. Did some treasure maps, sunk low level Damnships...
Now what?
We need for PvE
• Merchantships in different sizes to hunt and enter. Some with escort.
• Navy that hunts us on navy controlled grids.
• NPC villages and harbours to raid.
• Make it possible to to sell goods to NPCs on Freeports. Let there be diffrent needs of goods, so trading routes are needed
• Let us settle in lawless regions ( need more then now) Give structure a decay so it needs daily upkeep. Implement a building called workshop (autorepair), maybe in three sizes. A small made with thatch, a medium wood and a large with stone. Let them have a radius depending on their size. To make them work let us need to put a npc there and give him gold. And give it a storge for the mats needed for upkeep. Every Player can only build one small and one medium or large workshop. In companys they can build more depending on member numbers but with a max cap.
• Let every Player build only one harbour workshop (needs shoreline) for upkeep their shipyards, medium radius. Only four per company as a max cap.
• Implement npc cottages with workers for wood gathering or fishing. Take a look at the settlers games for ideas or at Anno. Thats how you should populate a pirate world. Let citys grow. Implement a economy for the citys.
• More shiptypes and sizes! Give us hulls that fit better for merchant freighters and whalehunters.
We all have that idea how a pirates world looks like, an Atlas is still miles away from that.

Hi there,
since the game started there are several things that need a certain kind of rework to be "good". I'd like to list them here once again since my people gathered some of these ideas.
Please rework the skins of female and male characters. There need to be more options to make a character a good looking one. Actually, the characters mostly look like shit. People like to play a game if characters are sexy instead of looking odd and ugly, but also this option would be nice.
Lighthouses have no certain use by now, only to get through the fog. Ok, you might attract some npc-trading ship but those guys are rare and have no use either. There should be an alarm-system or some benefit in building such a large tower out of nowhere. How about giving the opportunity to open a trading market below these towers or to attract some rare good looking mermaids and stuff, which really do matter to people? I would give my last penny for the possibility to tame a mermaid, which sings, laughs and is just looking good while we are at the harbor ...or just is there besides the ship while we are traveling long distances.
How about a search engine for crew members? Small crews mostly suffer under the pressure of huge crews and there is no possibility yet to get more men ...only shouting at each Freeport where nobody is online..only again these huge crews.... wow. You cannot grow if there is nobody to grow. It's a ridiculous situation. However, nobody wants to merge, everybody likes to stay on his own. This is going for months now. I do not like this at all. It really seems like there are only a few players left. How about giving them a possibility to search for a crew ingame with language filter, size and so on? (Black wall at a central npc town or something else!? This could also be a possible use of the lighthouse as well!)
Animals are still stuck on ships, npcs, ships glitch, especially for low end pcs when you log in. Ships are for example sinking while you load the textures.
The baby you want to get in is looking ugly. Think about character design twice, thx.
There are several islands with more yetis you can think of while others don't even get two or three. We handle them through traps, but this is really annoying. Control the spawns.
Bibliothek should get you a boost in intelligence and sort the list of blueprints.
How about selling useless blueprints for gold to npcs?
At this moment newcomers don't start the game because of a bad reputation. How about any reaction instead of patch notes only to attract people?
Server issues should also be handled for low gear pcs. How about making the system work on lower specs as well? (Very low option for graphics and stuff)
View distance is still high if you use lower view distance. See suggestion above.
What about nice underwear for characters for gold at Freeport?
Where the fuck are the pubs at Freeport?
You need smaller games. How about chess or Dame or card games against the money in Freeport? Small tournaments would be nice.
Add more stuff like this: How about some pretty extras like buying a personal space or adding a special trader, which only appears at special freeports or regions for usable goods?
Interaction is life. We need emotes.
There is no use of dead bodies by now. How about Zombies or something like that by cursing people?
Breeding is hard. Lower the time to breed.
Gathering shit is hard. How about giving the opportunity to gather shit in your base with a shit pile which collects shit automatically?
Gems have only a few possible uses. How about jewelry and bonuses combined with it?
Skins are nice. Give me more possibilities! (The ones which are about to come are ok, but how about even more or giving people the opportunity to do it by their own? :D)
Thanks. Hopefully, you can use this feedback.
Best regards
G

Here is my list of improvements after a fair amount of playtime. Please consider the critics. The game have good potentials but you really need to step away from the copy paste all mechanics ARK had. You need to bring more new stuff. Specially how to interact with objects. Your E menu interface is not fun at all. Noticeable when sailing.
My list of suggestions:
1. Cold = Death: If you decide to be on cold islands well fortitude won't save you, spent 8 points into it still freezes to death unless near 3 campfire with cloth armor. Also standing in houses require a lot of fire to keep warm.
Increase fortitude resistance to elements
House give resistance to all elements
2. Acid Rain: Rain comes together with cold fronts, as mention cold was already a huge issue and kills you a lot, being wet makes it even worse. I died in a warm freeport because a cold front with rain came. It is savage. Also spawning in rain 100% wet, 1 nano second in rain 100% wet.
Make wetness scale linear instead of 100% wet when outside.
The skill tree for resistance to coldness in water should apply to the coldness applied by the wetness bar. If wet you resist the extra coldness a lot better. Right now it is not even noticeable.
3. Building: It was not nice in ARK and since the game is more or less an exact copy it is still a pain. The use of T and Q to bring snap points and so forth barely noticeable and sloped half wall has a right and left config and it is pain in butts to pay attention to when to use the right one.
Automate the half sloped walls to fit for left and right.
Either make better visual for the use of T and Q instead half opacity white in left bottom corner or bring back old ARK building with blueprints instead of T
Loom is huge scale it down! looks like a big shop.
Longer time to pick up or always able to pick up.
4. Vitamine: So yes super cool idea but don't really work? I guess you want cooking to be a huge thing although the vitamine destroys it. You eat one source to the rim of overeating and vitamine overeating. The deplition of vitamine is far less than hunger. You get hungry much much quicker and whopsie daysie you are poisoned for eating to much of same vitamine. This can kill you.
Remove damage from overeating same source of vitamine
Sync vitamine depletion together with hunger depletion
Make skill of lesser vitamine depletion to also make hunger deplete lesser.
5. Boats: They are bad, it is so hard to sail them! Anchor is impossible, you need to find that hidden spot with small text, sails well you need to navigate through the worst interface menu of all games to find rotation and sail lower and raise buttons. Instead you could bound them to the actual buttons.
After pressing E on sails use W and S to raise and lower sails. Hold E to get Massive interface where you can quick lower or quick raise. Will make it more easier to sail.
Afer pressing E use A and D to turn around sail to Left and Right. Will make it much easier.
Sloops hole in middle totally useless unless hiding from acid rain. Can't build anything down there or take part of fire warmth.
Add visual anchor spot to press E on,
If stuck on land have sound effect and increase the turn speed for easier unstuck.
When sailing instead of only a small picture of showing wind and sails, add some sort of wind blowing in a certain direction. Make a fancier picture.
More animation and sounds during sailing. Like more water splashing against the boat when more rough seas and more bounce up and down on the waves with sounds of boat splashing down after a big wave.
6. Death: So there is a lot of glitches when it comes to death. If you die many times it clips through environment and you cant reach it.
Fix the body clipping through building, minerals, boats and ground.
Transfer all items button for all inventory management
Make the death beam smaller and more centralized.
Death beam animation of skull need improvement.
7. Resources: Well it is not that bad but some remarks here. When using sickle you get berries from berry bush and fiber from fiber bush. Why not get fiber from all bushes increase the rate of fiber gathered. Specially in the cold biome from cotton bushes barely noticeable.
Increase fiber gain from using Sickle.
When you harvest stone as an example you can hit anything near that stone. I got killed by a pack of elephants because I harvested stone on the opposite side of where an elephant stood.
Spears also hits everything in its surrounding even behind you. Once again elephants killed me because I tried to kill a chicken!
As a last mention please be sure to at least try to optimize things. 100 GB disk space and computers can barely run it. My friend gets black skyboxes and I run below 60 fps with GTX 1060 3GB where I could run ARK with almost 60 FPS with much higher settings in graphics. To me it seems to be the water causing a lot of problems.

I can support overall idea about characters getting older and eventually die. However only when that mechanics 100% done and work without ANY issues.
First thing first. Mechanics not even half done. There is still no "children" mechanics in the game yet. And yes, huge portion of players would prefer to do it "safer" way with simply switching to new younger character, rather than trying and finding Fountain of Youth.
As of Fountain of Youth its huge problem on it own. And not just Fountain, but Golden Age Ruin isles overall. I know you tried to make those isles dangerous. But what happening there right now is absolutely ridiculous. I can even support the idea of having creature on the isle much higher level than normal. But having half population of the isle as mythical creatures is just... *sigh*. It should be at most 5% of overall population been mythical creatures, not 50%.
Caves is problem on its own as well. I know its mostly uses resources from Ark and done very Ark-like. But in Ark at least you could overcome difficulties with excessively overpowered gear (which is bad thing in Ark, and i am glad Atlas tries approach gear system very differently). Yes, caves should be dangerous. But don't try to balance it so only 30+ group of ppl with high-end gear could do it. Instead make every cave its own instance (maybe even hosted independently on same or different server). And introduce mechanics where cave difficulty scales with number of players entering it (providing that ppl in same company and/or alliance would be put in the same instance). So in the end even solo or very small group could do it. Yes, it should be dangerous regardless, but at least doable.
And as of what to do right now to "fix" overall situation:
1) Do complete creature wipe on every golden ruins isle that contain FoY for few days, with no respawn of anything. Just to let ppl be able to get what they came for...
2) After those few days reset everyone's age back to 20. Most ppl won't get FoY buff, but at least will have their age reset. And stall aging mechanics completely, untill it will be developed to 100% (meaning "children mechanics would be implemented).
3) Do a very heavy tweaking with Golden Age Ruins isles spawn rates.
4) Last and hardest one, you really should work toward making cave systems as an instanced-dungeons, with proper scaling mechanics where it would be both dangerous, but still doable and fun for everyone, not just swarm of very well geared ppl.

Not sure what was changed in last patch. But this is excessive. I'm naked in Tropical zone-L10, with 50 fortitude and watch health drop like crazy everytime one hits. Going inside kinda helps but not before i'm almost dead.

Some suggestions on things that could be add during Early Access besides balancing and bug fixing.
Ships:
Brig: The current brig is just an expensive schooner. It needs a bit more gunports, there are still planks left that could fit a gunport and maybe they can be moved a bit closer together to at least have 10 gunports per side. Also the ships rail need to be lower so the deck guns don’t stick through it.
Frigats: A medium ship to fill the Gap between Schooner/Brig and Galleon. Having one or two gundecks with a total of 20 gunports per side.
Ship of the Line: A Flagship having about 3 or 4 complete gundecks and are extremely expensive even compared to the Galleon. Large companies need some kind of flagships as the normal galleon have become quiet common.
Huge Sails: The Large sails in the game are the right size for a brig but they are way too small for galleons and look rather stupid on them. The mast above the deck should atleast have a height of about the length of the ship.
Ship details:
besides planks and gunports there should be windows and balconies to design your ship especially at the stern like the real ships.
Also when placing walls inside a ship hull they should fill the gap to the hull.
Ship sinking:
Besides removing ways a ship should not sink. Ships should be more resistant to sinking, so you can shoot them to pieces and loot them more often than sinking them.
For this there should be a general resistance for planks so you don’t sink by a single plank been hit two times.
If a plank looses hp it will gain damage resistance. If it lost 50% hp it will have 50% resistance if it lost 99% hp it will have 99% resistance. But resistance will be reduced by a modifier resembling your ships condititon. All planks hp together will be the ships condition and if you lost for example 50% of the overall hp on all planks your ships condition will be 50% which will reduce all resistances your planks have by 50%. So the more damage your ship has taken the more easier it is to break a plank or damage it further but if your ship is in perfect condition planks will be very resistant to breaking. (would also require to adjust repair speed)
World:
Island diversity (and adding more Islands of course):
Free Islands – Civilian Islands with a neutral NPC claim for everyone to live on and maybe a NPC settlement for trading etc.
Exploration Islands – Islands you cant build on for exploring and the real pirate feeling.
Claimable Islands - Normal Islands to fight for.
Map rearrangement or special server:
All starter areas are on the west side. The farther you move east the higher level the enemies and the better the rewards and the rarer the resources get. First row are lawless areas, next rows are PVE, then some rows with PVP with offline protection and last full PVP sectors. Could also add an exploration sector where you cannot build and find rarest stuff on expeditions to truly uninhabited islands.
NPC Factions: Having some factions to liven up the world. (All using real ships/versions of the playerships)
Civilian – NPC Trader ships and Settlements. Offering buildspots in the city or free building on the rest of the island.
Navy – Having forts and military ports. Guarding the sea from pirates and ships of the damned.
Pirates – NPC pirates attacking players and traders. You can yield and they take your wares or a bribe and don’t sink your ship for no reason, unless you fight back. Having pirate nests where player pirates can get services and stuff also sell slaves or stolen goods.
Damnation – ships of the damned turned into real ships and only appearing during night time
Faction Areas and settlements:
factions have areas in which they are more numerous and the farther away from their area the rarer they appear. Ships of the damned for example only appear in vertain areas while in the other areas there are npc pirates and in some areas there are only few hostile ships and a strong navy presence.
Law System:
If you kill other players outside of company wars (add company wars of course) you will get a bounty on your head depending on what you did, a little for killing a player and more for sinking a ship or stealing a claim. If you live like a pirate you will be flagged as one.
Bounties can be collected by players that capture you and hand you to the navy or you get attacked by navy ships. Bounty will only decline if you are imprisoned but not from dying and respawning. Of course you can espace relatively easy if you don’t want to stay imprisoned for a long time but you keep your bounty that way.
Also include special starter islands/ pirate nests for players with a high bounty on their head.
Trading, crafting and resources:
crafting stuff will result in different quality. Better skill and higher tier resources will produce better results -> a ship plank from strong wood is better than one from soft wood.
containers have a maximum weight limit so you actually cant throw everything into one container.
containers can be moved, smalls ones by hand and carts and big ones with cranes(add cranes for this) and large carts.
renting and trading – allow to rent rooms or buy content of chests by asking a gold amount to unlock a door or chest
trader counter – a counter where you can place items and set a price on them to buy or sell
npc settlements – liven up trade buy having npc cities with traders that buy and sell
Weapons:
Dual wield swords and daggers and add daggers. Cant do something wrong with this its an always welcomed feature.
Job armor and clothes:
Every job should have appropriate clothing, light and warm version.
For example dancers shouldn’t be dancing around in fur armor or ship builders in metal armor.
Outfits give bonuses to the corresponding profession and liven up the world.

Ok so I was reading around on the forums and there are 2 main issues here.
offline raiding
and the gun nerf in v10
I havn’t played v10 yet as I’m out of town. However I have what I think is a reasonable solution to “offline raiding”. Due to the nature of ATLAS, everything is forever on the server and since it’s just the a game people cant always be on the server, but NPCs can!!
So here’s my suggestion. You can get NPCs to man your cannons and your sails. Then why cant you get NPCs to protect your base at night ? It’s just a thought and it will need a lot of work because you need to make an AI that recognizes attackers from just passers. Or maybe AI that fires only if fired upon.
Imagine this. You have built a shore base with some cannons placed strategically all around. You have your artillary and your musketeers on set patrol lines. Your ships are in dock and anchored . You can have a setting on your NPCs to be on “protect “ basically only firing if fired upon any of the company’s properies, Like walls, gates, ships, etc
it will be like having your own little army. Of course they will never be as smart as real players but it will still be some sort of resistance to the attackers making them think twice before attacking an offline base
But then again you might have the idea that this is great if you can have 2 dozens of these AI soldiers with their aimbots and their plate. Your base is fine even if you’re ONLINE.
I guess there is a solutions for this. You make it so that these guards, if you will, are weaker when there is a player of a friendly company around them. And strongner when there is none. ie ALL are offline.
Now with the gun nerf. Simple solution....FIX GUNS!!!
srsly tho, guns are naturally OP. I think if you wanna balance guns then make them harder to get. I have a suggestion since plate armour is basically useless against real guns. Just look it up on youtube. Musket vs breastplate. The .50 cal projectile fired from an early pistol or musket just has TOO MUCH ENERGY and will thus penetrate every and anything. Especially late medieval plate like the one depicted in the game. That’s why people got rid of armour when guns were invented bec it became useless. I understand this is a fantasy game but some sort of common sense should apply. Nerf guns by making them harder to obtain. Not by lowering their damage. Maybe have a system where these muskets or pistols are not very effective at long range as they really were. Because ball projectiles are not very aerodynamical are they?
so yeah tell me what do you think guys.

Been living in the Polar regions (15 sections) for about 2 weeks now and although it was pretty much an insane nightmare at first, it's really warmed up to be a place I'm proud to call home along with my company/alliance.
Couple things I couldn't help but notice about it that I really wanted to comment on, one of which was a pretty important one that I tested out tonight.
First thing to know about the polar/artic regions if you don't already know is that there's only 4 main types of animals you'll come across aside from birds and creatures of the sea. Those are - Yetis, Bears, Penguins, and of course the Wolves. My suggestions mainly consist of taming/breeding related stuff.
First thing is that you can't breed wolves right now. They're pretty easy to tame if you build a custom taming pen or even if you stand on a rock/using a climbing pick to climb onto a rock formation. But there's no option to breed them. Not sure if this was intended because out of the wolves/bears/yeti's they're probably the easiest to tame despite being crazy to deal with. I have about 8 of them now but haven't tamed anymore because I'd love to just start breeding them. Would like to suggest that gets added.
Second - Can't tame yeti's right now. Tested this out with a friend when we managed to trap a yeti in a pen and it was looking at him. Was standing behind the yeti for about 2 minutes and the option to feed it/notification that it's not ready to feed never popped up. This one makes sense considering how powerful and beefy yeti's are (starting out with over 2000 health) but this would be a nice feature to have if it is supposed to be there (along with the breeding).
Third - Penguins. If we're supposed to get prime fish meat to feed penguins that leaves us with trying to kill sharks and probably dolphins/angler fish. It would be nice if we could get prime fish meat, even a little from regular fish or at the very least manta rays. Penguins really help with generating body heat so they would be great for survival in these super cold regions. Hopefully these are breed-able currently.
Fourth and Last - Bears can't seem to breed in these regions or have an extreme requirement to start breeding right now. We have people in our alliance that have been breeding bears for a bit now in the tundra zones (14 section) but I feel that it would also make sense if under the right circumstances in the 15 zones you could breed them too. I get that they might not want to if it's too cold but I was trying everything to get an incubation/breeding center setup and nothing worked. This was the third setup I tried - https://imgur.com/a/bGZ6mZ2
but still no luck. Was attempting to get penguins to try and generate extra heat for them but I doubt that would've worked. My last suggestion is if it's actually enabled and they just need to be warm enough, maybe the bear breeding requirement heat wise could be lowered to something reasonable? Like a full enclosed space with or w/o one campfire or about 0 degrees requirement.
And if it's not currently enabled for polar/artic zones then it would be great if it could be. These mammals are all we really have access to right now down here without having to go back and fourth from tundra to do it. Would give even more incentive to live down here for sure.

So first off just a quick message to the Devs. Thank you so much. I have been playing ark since it was at this stage in its development and thoroughly enjoyed the ride and I'm looking forward to the ups and downs that atlas has in store. I've always wanted a water world styled ark map and this is it, with its own unique spin and flavor.
So onto the Feedback/ suggestions.
Claims:A topic of much controversy the claiming system has been bashed by just about every single player at least once so far, but why? Well besides the well-known issues with contesting i think the big issue is wasted space. if we have four companys make a claim each, in a square, without overlapping, we have a space in the middle that nobody owns and that nobody can now claim. look at any island and you will find at least one spot where a claim could almost just about fit.
to fix this have the claims act more like a bubble. where the lines cant overlap but instead just smush into each other and try to fill the available space. alternately laydown a smaller square grid over each map, and have a claim take its respective square on the grid. this second method would reflect how actual claims work today.
i think the second issue is how claims are actually contested. i was attempting to claim some uncontested land on pve na, and i spend a solid hour trying to find out why every time i dropped my flag it would say contested. moving back and forth up and down this way and that way trying to make sure my lines weren't overlapping anyone's claims. i finally found the issue, some lvl 4 pc had logged out in a bush inside the area i wanted to claim. this likely never coming back player sleeping in uncontested land that i could have claimed was stopping me from claiming.
To fix this. making it so that a player has to also put down a flag or at least have their flag out to contest the claiming of unclaimed land would help, also making it that only people in the company that owns a claim or their allies can prevent the stealing of a claim as opposed to any rando would go a long way as well.
Lastly on the topic of claims. allies can steal your claim and even if you are online and standing right under the flag you cant contest it. this needs to be removed to prevent blue raids.
Trade. there should be some kind of trade goods. things like silks, spices, and relics. things that we can sell for additional gold. taking these items to the trade ports or to a merchant's vessel would be a great reason to actually have to leave the house.
Free market. Having the Free Ports have some kind of auction house where we can sell our goods for a set price would go a long way.
These are just a few things that i have thought about. if i think of anything else i will be sure to ether update this post or make a new one.